Few things genuinely annoyed President Ronald Reagan. One of them was criticism of his wife, Nancy; another was men telling off-color jokes when a woman was present. He hated being saddled with a schedule so crowded that he ended up running late and making people wait for him. He detested missing dessert.

But during his White House years, nothing seemed to irritate him as much as when people said he had “become” president. Whenever he heard that, he always interrupted the speaker to firmly say: “No, I didn’t become president. I was elected to the job, and it’s only temporary. In some countries, a person becomes a king or queen, but not here.”